11.2.18

A Film a Week - The Boss: The Beginning / Gazda: Početak

When
Dario Juričan’s début documentary feature The Boss
came out in 2016. its subject Ivica Todorić was still
considered the captain of industry and his company Agrokor,
even though burdened with huge debt to foreign creditors, simply too
big to fall. The situation now is somewhat different: Todorić is a
fugitive from the law and a blogger exposing his private and
professional connections with different Croatian administrations and
Agrokor, still too big to fail, fell under the state-sponsored
management trying to “solve the crisis”. It is safe to assume
that he did not fall from grace because of the documentary itself,
but let us hope that it at least contributed, even as “bad press”
about the topic. However, until recently, the film did not have a
regular distribution and was not shown on television since media did
not want to upset “The Boss” and his friends in high politics,
which is a textbook example of corruption in Croatian society.

Anyhow,
Juričan and his investigating team decided to go further in the past
and examine another big boss, the one who got filthy rich in the time
of war using his political connections, the one who is actually
convicted by the court of law. The subject of The Boss: The
Beginning is Miroslav Kutle, the tycoon from the deep 90’s
and the boss of the first wave of privatization in Croatia. His
Globus Group was involved in different branches of business,
from restaurants, bakeries, retailing, media, real-estate and so on,
intertwined with banking and financial industry on the national level
and sanctioned, if not by the government, than by the structures of
the party in power. Kutle made most of his money by draining the
firms he acquired “for peanuts”, through financial scam or by
government decision. He now lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina where he
walks freely due to legal loopholes.

The
chief value of the film is an informative one, both for Croatian
viewers to remind themselves of the chaotic privatization and the
regional ones to get some kind of insight to it. Juričan constructed
the story around his subject and gave us a look into the different
aspects of society that was too concentrated on war, politics and
nationalist propaganda to see a robbery going on masked as the
transition from socialist to free market system, with all the
“creative accounting”, threats of violence, and plain old forgery
included. His choice of persons he interviewed is more than
interesting and covers all the spectre politically and
intellectually, from washed-up politicians, war-time buffoons,
douchebags and nitwits (some of them actually defending Kutle after
all) to respected lawyers and journalists.

Aside
of talking heads in the interviews and rarely used archive material,
Juričan fills the gaps with situational shots of cities and city
streets, empty, devastated buildings and footage of his travelling by
car or bike and his investigating in archives. From the cinematic
point of view, The Boss: The Beginning is a run of the mill
news documentary, almost ideal for television, but not inspired and
inspiring enough for the big screen, with the graphic of rats leaving
the screen by the end of the film being its only comment.